Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and one of America s and the world s most prominent public intellectual. In this episode, Francis and Constance talk with him about how he became who he is, how he got to where he is now, and what it means to be an intellectual.
00:08:32.180It's not to actually have a discussion.
00:08:34.040It's to destroy and ultimately to win.
00:08:35.980Yeah, well, especially if you're not, if you're a public person dealing with people who are not public people, right?
00:08:43.340Because then there's really, then it's just a single shot, you know, lottery.
00:08:48.120It's not a, there's no ongoing future of collaboration or cooperation that is being maintained.
00:08:55.420I mean, it's even bad when you have two public people who, you know, are, who know, both know they're going to meet each other in real life at some point.
00:09:05.160Still the wheels come off rather often to a surprising degree.
00:09:09.580But yeah, it's just, in the end, I think it's bad technology, which is still somewhat inscrutable because it seems like it should be good.
00:09:21.460I mean, and in some ways it is good because you're seeing, you know, you're seeing a lot of smart people tell you what the most interests them and most worries them on a daily basis and, you know, sending you articles and videos that you, and that's, that's why I'm on, that's why I can't break my connection to it because I'm following so many smart people who are curating for me an information diet that I still appreciate.
00:09:44.440And then I, you know, occasionally put my own stuff out there just so it's like a kind of a marketing channel, but I'm doing much less in the weeds back and forth with even public people who I notice, you know, you know, poke me on, on a given issue or whatever.
00:10:00.140So Sam, does it not go, do you not have a little thought in your head when you go to tackle these very contentious subjects, you know, and you know that you're going to get pushback, you know, that you're going to get flat, you know, that you're going to get misrepresented.
00:10:15.180Do you not think I really shouldn't be doing this or what goes through your mind before you go out and you make your point?
00:10:22.380I love shopping for new jackets and boots this season.
00:10:25.480And when I do, I always make sure I get cash back with Rakuten.
00:10:52.380Well, again, I think about it more than I used to now.
00:11:00.020I mean, I used to do it veryβbasically, there was no friction in the system.
00:11:05.240I mean, I just was like, okay, this is like that cartoon meme, you know, somebody on the Internet is wrong about something.
00:11:11.780I was that guy on Twitter, and so I'm not that guy anymore.
00:11:19.900And I really do pick my moments, and there's a cost to that because there's, you know, that you decide to sit certain moments, you know, cultural moments.
00:11:31.680But if I guess I could distill it to a lesson here, it's like you're notβyou don't always need to have an opinion about everything, right?
00:11:46.940You certainly don't always need to have a strong opinion about everything.
00:11:49.280And even if you do have a strong opinion, you don't always have to be the person expressing that opinion because very likely someone else will, right?
00:11:58.620And, you know, given those adjustments to the machine, you can just decide, you know, is thisβdo I really want to spend the next 24 hours dealing with the aftermath of this thing that I'm tempted to tweet, right, or to say in some other format?
00:12:16.420And in particular, it relates to the likelihood that certain personalities are going to go berserk.
00:12:24.320And then with certain people, it's, you know, it's guaranteed that they're going to go berserk.
00:12:28.000So, like, do Iβyeah, here's this odious opinion expressed by a, you know, a semi-odious person who really deserves to hear what I think right now.
00:12:41.180Is it worth, you know, whacking that hornet's nest and then just dealing withβdealing with and being seen to deal with or to not deal with and to maybe look like you can't deal with the aftermath, right?
00:12:54.920Sam, you talked about tribalism at the beginning, and that's something that Francis and I both feel very strongly is contributing to much of the divisiveness and the way things are going.
00:13:05.260And, look, let's be clear, you know, the show is called Trigonometry.
00:13:07.980We want to explore difficult subjects.
00:13:10.160There's no question that neither him or I are woke in theβopposing that ideology has been a big part of what we do.
00:13:17.060But the tribalism is a different thing.
00:13:19.900We don't want to be in the anti-woke tribe or the woke tribe, right?
00:13:23.920And there was a tribe around 2015, 2016, this very small tribe of very smart people, which was referred to as the intellectual dark web, which I remember at that time, we weren't doing this, we were just two comedians.
00:13:36.720I remember watching you guys have those conversations and being inspired by people.
00:13:41.160I don't think you guys had the answers, but you had the right questions.
00:13:45.420And then, over time, we watched that loose tribe of very bright people, as loose tribes of very bright people always do, crumble, disintegrate, fall out.
00:13:56.940Well, the first thing that happened is that it was actually, for some of us more than others, a tongue-in-cheek label for a tribe that really wasn'tβI mean, none of us are tribal people.
00:14:09.140You know, it really is a herding cats sort of situation.
00:14:13.620And when I launchedβso, you know, it was Eric Weinstein coinage, which I launched on a podcast we did.
00:14:20.620And I think in that context, I telegraphed that I thought it was tongue-in-cheek.
00:14:26.820I mean, I think he probably thought it was more in earnest than I did, or he was at least more attached to the label.
00:14:32.320And then, very quickly, there were people who sort of joined this collection or who were said to be in it, some of whom I had never heard of at that point, who, you know, upon just a little bit of analysis, revealed themselves to be people who I, you know, I really don't agree with.
00:14:54.320Not just on the actual substance of specific opinions, just their methodology by which they would generate opinions or their lack of methodology.
00:15:04.300So, you know, I'm not inclined to name names, but there are people who, like, it's just wrong to think, you know, they were ever moving in the same lane I was in at that point when we were all called IDW people, right?
00:15:18.900But I think the biggest force of fragmentation was Trump and what certain people did or didn't do with that phenomenon, you know?
00:15:31.440And this is what I was going to ask you. I'd say there were two things that fractured it from looking in from the outside.
00:15:36.300I mean, COVID later, but Trump was the big one.
00:15:38.600So let's start with Trump, because I want to talk about COVID as well.
00:15:41.080But if we start with Trump, you took a different view to almost everybody, I would say, in what was described as the IDW, in the sense that you were, I think you were calling for Twitter to shut down Trump's account and were happy that it happened.
00:16:03.260One, so the non, the generic reason is, and this is something I've never gotten a clear answer on from any of the people who took the different side of this.
00:16:17.460And many, so many of these people are ostensibly libertarians, or at least, you know, quasi-libertarians.
00:16:22.340And they want something like a minimum of state coercion and control.
00:16:28.120They don't want just a proliferation of laws, you know, just to make our lives more difficult.
00:16:35.520And that's an orientation, you know, though I consider myself liberal and have always voted as a Democrat.
00:16:43.000I mean, until we dealt with this woke apocalypse, you know, I would have certainly called myself a Democrat without much self-consciousness.
00:16:50.280But, you know, I've always had this libertarian kind of underpinning to my politics, which is, you know, if the private sector can handle it, it's probably best done there, right?
00:17:03.280I mean, just given the level of inefficiency and poorly aligned incentives you get in a government bureaucracy.
00:17:09.480And peaceful, honest people should have the right to be left alone, you know, so it's like unless somebody is harming people or, you know, guilty of fraud, you know, i.e. theft, you know, stealing from people, we don't need the government involved.
00:17:30.200And so, you know, that's my general framework.
00:17:35.040And many people ostensibly in this group ostensibly agreed with that.
00:17:39.360So when I look at Twitter, you know, Twitter is a company that can decide to, you know, as someone who has started, you know, information-based companies at this point, I'm just thinking about what's the scenario under which I would want the government to force me to have Alex Jones on my podcast or to have Donald Trump on my podcast?
00:18:03.860Shouldn't I be able to have anyone I want on my podcast?
00:18:05.600Is it conceivable that my podcast could grow so big or that my, you know, that any other platform, you know, I've considered creating a social media platform, right?
00:18:15.520If that could grow so big that suddenly the government would have an interest in forcing me to have people on it who, for whatever reason, I object to having on it.
00:18:26.040I mean, so this is a way in which I'm more extreme than most people on the left.
00:18:32.120Like, I do think at this point in history, you should be able to have a social media platform and exclude any specific group you want and just say that's the way we do it, right?
00:18:45.360And if you don't like it, boycott us, right?
00:18:47.780So, like, I wouldn't have said this in 1964 when we have to pass the Civil Rights Act.
00:18:52.700But at this point, I think you should have the right to be an asshole who destroys your reputation and suffers the penalties in, you know, in the marketplace of ideas, right?
00:19:05.160So, I think if you want to just have a social media network for beautiful people, right, or people who are, you know, guys who are over six feet two and blonde hair and blue eyes, right, you know, I can't get on.
00:19:15.460You should feel free to, you know, raise money for that enterprise, launch it, and I'll be, you know, I'll laugh when it fails, right?
00:19:22.820So, like, that's β now, under some control, that kind of thing, you know, is or should be illegal, you know, if you're just a normal person on the left.
00:19:34.880But I don't think β I think at this moment in history it shouldn't be.
00:19:39.260But in any case, I just β when I look at Twitter, I see a company that has a term β has terms of service, which people like Alex Jones and Trump clearly violated.
00:19:49.780I mean, whether they in fact violated this terms of service as written, I think they violated any coherent terms of service that Twitter should have had, right?
00:20:00.200Like, you shouldn't knowingly be able to turn your mob on a private citizen and ruin their lives through doxing, right, which is what Jones and Trump were doing just again and again and again to people.
00:20:14.280Every time β I mean, Jones was doing it with the Sandy Hook parents, right?
00:20:26.840I think Trump is essentially β we got Alex Jones as president of the United States.
00:20:31.220I don't think they're very different people.
00:20:32.760I think it's the same phenomenon in my world.
00:20:35.260Because just the level of misinformation, disinformation, lying, the charlatanism, the conscious fraudulence of everything at scale and the targeting of individuals with known consequences, right?
00:20:51.920Like, Trump β every time Trump singles out a specific citizen and says, look at this jackass who's trying to β whatever the claim would be, that is a human sacrifice.
00:21:06.740We know that person's life is just never the same again because he's turned tens of millions of morons on that person and, you know, vicious morons on that.
00:21:19.280I mean, like that's β the core of the Trump phenomenon is now and has been for many years.
00:21:26.840I mean, really, since the beginning, since he β certainly since he became the frontrunner and certainly since he became elected in 2016, it's a personality cult.
00:21:37.840I mean, it has all the dynamics of a personality cult.
00:21:39.880These are not reasoning β yes, there are some β there are a few calculated people like Peter Thiel on the margins who have some story as to why they would back him, right?
00:21:49.440But the core of the cult, you know, which is all, you know, nested with QAnon and conspiracy thinking and the big lie and, you know, it's like Trump can do no wrong, right?
00:22:02.240He's β that is so β it's β I mean, as a Venn diagram, it's just β it overlaps 80 percent with the Alex Jones phenomenon.
00:22:11.980So I just β I see them as the same problem.
00:22:14.340I see β these are β these are, you know, if they're not actually clinically, you know, diagnosable as psychopaths, they're the next best thing.
00:22:24.260These are people who are so malignantly selfish and so careless with respect to the consequences of their actions in the lives of others that if you are β if you own a platform or you're, you know,
00:22:38.960you're overseeing a public company that owns a platform, why should the government force you to keep these people on, right?
00:22:51.280Like, you should be free to say, sorry, you're not on my watch.
00:22:54.860Are you going to be having these consequences?
00:22:57.580And with Trump, it was β after January 6th, there was just β I mean, that's when it happened.
00:23:01.560I thought it happened a year too late.
00:23:03.980But, I mean, January 6th finally convinced Dorsey he should kick Trump off.
00:23:08.180And that β I mean, if that's not going to convince you that, you know, we have β we had a β at that point we had a sitting president who for months and months and months, I mean, you know, at least six or eight months, you know, certainly months prior to the November election, would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
00:23:25.980And then he did, you know, certainly something, whether it was everything in his power or just a lot, he managed to see that we did not have a peaceful transfer of power, right?
00:23:39.120And then, you know, so what's the mob going to do on January 7th and 8th and 9th, you know, if you just leave Trump on the platform?
00:23:48.520I mean, I just thought it was a very simple decision to kick him off and totally analogous to the Alex Jones decision.
00:23:57.160I mean, Alex Jones is just less consequential, but, I mean, there are Sandy Hook parents who have had to move 10 times since their kids were murdered.
00:24:53.300Francis, before you move us into COVID, let me try from a different angle, Sam, because I want to explore this intellectual point, right?
00:25:00.340Do you really want to live in a country where you have a digital public square, which, in my opinion, Twitter is.
00:25:06.360We can disagree about that if you want, but that's my opinion.
00:25:08.540It's a digital public square, and you have a company that has clearly one-sided enforcement.
00:25:14.820I hear what you're saying about delegitimizing the electoral process that Trump did, and I was concerned about that.
00:25:22.060I think you can't question the system in that way.
00:25:24.280But when you see that he gets banned, and then a story about Hunter Biden gets banned, that under the guise of it being Russian disinformation, we later learn it wasn't Russian disinformation.
00:25:36.800That, to a lot of people, seems like, you know, I said it when we were talking to Joe Rogan, it's putting your hand on the scales in favor of one side.
00:25:45.520In the digital public square, you add that to the banning of Trump and lots of other people being banned from one side, predominantly.
00:25:54.160Is that the world you want to live in, where one team gets to just ban people it disagrees with off the platform?
00:26:01.860It gets to pretend that things that are true are not true.
00:26:05.080It gets to shut down the sharing of information with people who want to make their own democratic choice?
00:26:09.880Well, it's a hard question, and there are pieces of the question that are individually hard.
00:26:15.960It's like the Hunter Biden laptop story is something that I still don't have a full opinion about.
00:26:25.560I actually don't know what we should have done about that.
00:27:39.760I just feel like people can start their own companies, which they have, right?
00:27:45.320So they can start competitors at Twitter.
00:27:46.760There are many people who, you know, Twitter is not, it's still a failing business, right?
00:27:50.560It's like it's not, it doesn't work, really.
00:27:53.780I mean, Facebook is a much better business.
00:27:55.740There's nothing stopping Facebook from becoming stickier for intellectuals and journalists and attracting more of the conversation over there.
00:28:11.880It's just, it's an extreme move to say you can't, you can't be biased, right?
00:28:21.220Like who's, who's going to say that, but behind, behind the saying of that is a law in the end and there, and therefore it's a gun.
00:28:29.200Therefore it's, it's, it's jail time for the person who wants to keep breaking the law, right?
00:28:33.640So like, just imagine, imagine if Twitter, the Twitter board, it's like what you, everyone gets what they want.
00:28:38.780You know, everyone who's, who's of this opinion gets what they want.
00:28:41.160You just, we're going to, we're going to come in and, and, and, and enforce something like, um, uh, a zero bias state in Twitter, insofar as that's possible.
00:28:52.440And if the, if the employees and the board just say, you know, sorry, we, we have a point of view.
00:28:57.140We want, we want to have, we, we don't like these people and we like these people.
00:29:01.980Um, what does now you just break up the company?
00:29:05.540You just say, you know, I mean, I, I thought what I thought it should have happened with Twitter.
00:29:09.800I thought Jack Dorsey should have deleted it.
00:29:12.960I mean, I literally thought he should, would have got the Nobel Peace Prize and he just at a certain point deleted it.
00:29:31.220Should they be cajoled by unhappy people like yourselves or like, you know, the, uh, um,
00:29:38.540you know, the Trump fans to, um, to behave better?
00:29:42.560I'm just putting the counter argument to you, Sam.
00:29:44.400I mean, I think, so yeah, yes, I think
00:29:46.080if they were going to be, the first thing to admit is it may be impossible to do this impeccably, right?
00:29:54.460It's like, it's like the, until we have, you know, perfect artificial intelligence, it's just going to be impossible to be truly consistent with your terms of service because you're always going to be able to find the example of the thing that was not appropriately moderated.
00:30:10.280Yes, but if, we all know that if that laptop was Donald Trump's Jr., this would be treated, that's, that's all I'm asking.
00:30:17.480Oh yeah, but that's, so let's take that piece.
00:30:21.060Um, I think it was totally appropriate to view Trump in a, to be existing in a, in a domain that was orthogonal to partisan politics.
00:30:36.560I, my criticism of Trump is totally nonpartisan, right?
00:30:40.980There is absolutely, there's literally nothing I say about Trump that I could say about any other Republican, right?
00:30:47.820And I think Liz Cheney is a total hero, right?
00:30:50.320So, so, and I don't agree with her politics at all, right?
00:30:53.320Like Liz Cheney is a religious maniac by my lights, right?
00:30:57.360And in, in, in that sense, kind of a terrifying political figure, like, like, like, like the, the old me who, you know, was just worried about the Christian theocracy in the United States, um, would have just revolted at everything she would attempt to implement as a politician.
00:31:16.840But, at this moment, she's, you know, she has no bigger fan than me because of how she's dealing with the Trump phenomenon.
00:31:27.240The Trump phenomenon is not a matter of political partisanship.
00:31:30.880He, he is a, he is just a sui generis, uh, phenomenon.
00:31:35.420And it's, again, it's, it's, it's analogous to having elected Alex Jones president of the United States.
00:31:41.280It's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's not a matter of his, like, I probably agree with half of his policies or more than half of his policies.
00:32:09.600Every screw that you would want totally cranked down is loose or non-existent in him.
00:32:15.720Um, and so, yeah, so it's, I mean, that, that's my argument.
00:32:19.600So, so my argument is that it was appropriate for Twitter and the heads of big tech and journal, and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of something like a, a once in a lifetime moral emergency, right?
00:32:36.760Whereas this is not the same thing as not liking George Bush, you know, or not liking John McCain or not liking Mitt Romney for their politics.
00:32:46.460This was, here's a guy who is capable of anything, right?
00:32:53.900He's not, he's not ideological, but he's, again, he's, he's a black hole of selfishness, right?
00:32:59.500He's, he's, he's just, and so there's no telling what he's going to do.
00:33:04.060Um, and we cannot afford to have four more years with this guy, right?
00:33:09.680And, and, and so, um, so what, what should well-intentioned people do who have a lot of power in these various ways?
00:33:19.640You know, you're running the New York Times, you're running CNN, you're running Twitter.
00:33:35.540So, he, I mean, CNN, CNN gave us Trump, right?
00:33:38.740Well, no, before CNN gave us Trump, Mark Burnett gave us Trump.
00:33:42.500I mean, if there's one person who could have not done what he did and, and could have closed the door to this whole phenomenon, it was Mark Burnett.
00:33:52.320Um, but, yeah, no, by giving him the attention, you know, but he was, he was great ratings, you know, for a year, for the whole run-up to, to the 2016 election.
00:34:04.500And, oh, yeah, no, there, no one has clean hands here.
00:34:08.720But at the 11th hour, when it's, when, who knows how this election is going to go, who knows, who knows what the capacity for, you know, disinformation at the last minute to, to tip the balance is.
00:34:22.960And then what do you do with the Hunter Biden laptop story when we already know, we, we know how this played out in 2016 with the Hillary Clinton email, you know, press conference where, where Comey in, in, in, in, in, in an abundance of scrupulosity felt like he had to come before the cameras, I think 10 days out from the election.
00:34:44.140And say, you know, we've, we're going to open up this, this investigation again, because we've got Anthony Weiner's laptop.
00:34:52.520We could see, I mean, again, her failure to become president was overdetermined.
00:34:56.860She was a, an appallingly bad candidate.
00:34:58.820But in terms of just tracking the poll numbers, you could, like, that was, that was the killing blow to her candidacy, right?
00:35:09.940And this was a, this was a highly analogous situation.
00:35:13.060This was, we're going to open up this laptop from hell and the news cycle for who knows how long is going to be just, just conceivably just a nuclear bomb of an October, October surprise.
00:35:29.200And we're going to get four more years of Trump if we actually give this a fair hearing.
00:36:04.860No, but I'll just say, just finally, I do, again, it's like a coin toss for me, the Hunter Biden laptop thing.
00:36:11.900Because I do understand how corrosive it is for an institution like the New York Times to show obvious bias and inconsistency and dishonesty in how they, it's like they couldn't even frame it honestly.
00:36:30.200It's not like, it's not like, it's like the way I would frame it is, listen, I don't care what's in Hunter Biden's law.
00:36:38.940I mean, Hunter Biden, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement.
00:36:48.960First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right?
00:36:50.420It's not, it's like, it's not Joe Biden, but even if Joe, like, even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like, if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right?
00:37:07.720It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.
00:37:16.220It's like, it's like, it's like a firefly to the sun, right?
00:37:18.920I mean, like, there's just, it doesn't even, it doesn't even stack up against Trump University, right?
00:37:24.680Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop, in my view, right?
00:37:31.500Now, that's not, that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the, you know, the New York Post's Twitter account.
00:37:43.660Like, that's just a conspiracy, that's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.
00:38:20.460Well, so it's, but the thing is, it's just not left-wing, right?
00:38:22.640So Liz Cheney is not left-wing, right?
00:38:24.920Liz Cheney is doing everything in her power.
00:38:27.020Conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected.
00:38:29.160No, but there's nothing, conspiracy, it's not, it was a conspiracy out in the open.
00:38:33.660It does, but it doesn't matter if it was, it doesn't matter what part's conspiracy, what part's out in the open.
00:38:38.620I mean, I think it's like, if people get together and talk, and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon, you know,
00:38:44.740if it's like, if there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right?
00:39:05.300Politically speaking, I consider Trump an existential threat to our democracy, right?
00:39:10.440Now, he's not going to destroy the world, very likely.
00:39:13.140If you destroy democracy in the process of protecting democracy.
00:39:16.540But that doesn't destroy, no, our, I'm not, what I'm not suggesting, at no point was I suggesting we should stuff ballots.
00:39:26.260Or actually break the machinery of democracy, but the political opinion is already being just completely inundated with misinformation, bias takes, half-truths, and outright lies, right?
00:39:44.400Or just the amplification of bad or misleading information based on, you know, the algorithm, right?
00:39:50.220So, it's like it's already just an abattoir of opinion, right?
00:39:59.400And now the question is, you know, what can you do with your own biases and your own, to get the outcome you think is actually better, not just for yourself personally, but for the world, right?
00:40:13.260So, like, I have, like, it is, I'm completely unconflicted in the claim that a first Trump term was bad and a second Trump term would be bad.
00:40:27.260And it literally doesn't matter what was, what else was on the menu.
00:40:33.280Like, literally, pick a random American better than Trump in the Oval Office.
00:40:39.200Like, the likelihood that you're going to get someone who's worse than Trump, given what I consider that is bad about Trump, is, I mean, it's on the order of one in a million, right?
00:40:51.800Like, you're just not, you're not going to get, you're not going to get worse than Trump if you pick at random.
00:40:56.360And, you know, Hillary Clinton, for all of her flaws, was not worse than Trump.
00:41:00.240Joe Biden, for all, Joe Biden, we could have known Joe Biden was going to just be comatose in office, not worse than Trump, right?
00:41:07.720Kamala Harris, not worse, like, it's all, and again, it's not just a marginal call.
00:41:13.480It's just, these are people who are normal politicians who are so much more constrained by predictable machinery, right?
00:41:24.560Like, there's such less of an opportunity there to destroy institutions that we have to rely on, right?
00:41:35.120With any of those people in charge, including a random person in charge, a random person who's going to be terrified at the responsibility of the office and default to expert opinion, you know, across the board.
00:41:46.680No, Trump is, again, Trump is an Alex Jones level figure for me.
00:41:53.240And so, you know, it's like a smaller problem is to just for some billionaire to buy the New York Times and give it to Alex Jones to run, right?
00:42:02.040That would be an enormous, that would be a catastrophic loss and mistake.
00:42:05.520But that's a smaller problem than getting Trump reelected.
00:42:09.780The last question I'm going to ask, which actually isn't really about Trump, is, I think, could you agree that with Trump, the reason he is created is because he is a symptom of the system, whereby people, ordinary people feel that their voices aren't being heard?
00:42:27.080They realize that, you know, Washington is a machine that doesn't particularly care about them.
00:42:32.760They were betrayed time after time, many times by the Democrats, many times by the Democrats who said that they were representing ordinary working people, like the Labour Party were in my country.
00:42:42.780And they felt that these politicians didn't care.
00:43:34.160We're just going to enjoy just watching this thing, you know, swing through everything you care about.
00:43:40.780And, you know, just the sounds of explosions are going to just give us pleasure, right?
00:43:48.060Like, that's where we are with tens of millions of people in this country.
00:43:53.240That's a, you know, that is a very scary basis from which to try to, you know, cooperate at scale and produce political outcomes that are actually going to be good, right?
00:44:09.920And, again, the extremes amplify each other, right?
00:44:13.920I mean, there was no greater goad to wokeism than Trumpism, right?
00:44:18.520And so, like, and, you know, I put myself, you know, in second place to nobody, you know, although I probably spent a little bit less time on it than some people we could name.
00:44:29.860And in my, in the revulsion, I feel, to the extreme left, you know, activism, right?
00:44:39.380I mean, it's just, it's as dishonest as it can possibly be.
00:44:44.160And it's, and it's dishonesty is harder to parse for smart people.
00:44:48.840Smart ethical people find what's happening on the left much more confusing than what's happening on the right.
00:44:54.440So it's like, so people ask me, and so, and I spend much more time focused on the left than I, than I do on Trump or on the right, because.
00:45:14.980I come from a society that's seen some of these ideas being implemented.
00:45:18.600Why do you feel revulsion, a very, very strong emotion about this ideology?
00:45:24.440Well, because it's, I mean, one, it is destroying institutions that I actually care about, right?
00:45:36.440It's like, you know, white supremacy and far right lunacy is not affecting institutions that matter, you know, by my lights, right?
00:45:47.980You know, you could argue it affected the, you know, the White House and the U.S. government to some degree at the margins.
00:45:53.900I mean, I think allegations of Trump's racism or his alignment with the far right and white supremacy, I think that's been massively exaggerated by the left.
00:46:06.580And, you know, most of the claims to his, I actually have no doubt that he's actually racist, but most of the public claims to his racism, I think, are obviously false and, you know, inconsistent.
00:46:17.620And so it's, I mean, I think you have to be intellectually honest, even as you derive these dangerous people and extremes.
00:46:26.460So the left has, you know, as I'm sure you've pointed out many times on your show, I mean, it has captured institutions.
00:46:46.280It's, and for reasons that are understandable, because, you know, it is hard to figure out what's wrong with Black Lives Matter as a movement.
00:46:57.200It's like it's, you look at it, you know, it's almost perfectly engineered to just, you know, get past the blood-brain barrier and just attach to all the right ethical receptor sites, right?
00:47:14.040It's like, it's just, this is, this is, of course, I care about, you know, of course, racism is disgusting.
00:47:23.120I would, the last thing I would want to be is a racist.
00:47:25.640Of course, I acknowledge the legacy of slavery and just how hard fought all of our civil rights gains have been in the United States.
00:47:33.500Of course, I don't want, you know, members of minority groups feeling victimized, you know, much less being victimized.
00:47:39.960You know, I want fair hiring practices, you know, just check all the boxes on, you know, to have a good liberal conscience, right?
00:47:49.400If you're that sort of person and you're confronted by Black Lives Matter as a social phenomenon and the protests over George Floyd and all of that, it is very hard to see that you're in the presence of a completely dishonest moral panic, right?
00:48:09.900Because there's so many points of contact with real grievance or potential points of contact with real grievance.
00:48:16.420And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's harder to parse, therefore more interesting.
00:48:23.040I mean, and it's also more consequential in my world because it's vitiating the New York Times and Princeton University and, you know, Science Magazine.
00:48:32.520And so, like, it's just, it's, it's a, it's a full-on moral panic out there.
00:48:39.460And, and what's more, you have this layer of smart people who think all of that's being exaggerated, right?
00:48:47.320It's a few kids, you know, on a few college campuses.
00:48:50.240It's just like, you know, 18 people at Yale, you know, lambasting Nicholas Christakis and everyone else is really just a bystander to this.
00:49:01.760And it's, it's, it's all being exaggerated.
00:49:05.980The kernel of truth there is it really is, it's still a minority of people who actually believe this stuff.
00:49:11.140But, you know, you only need something like 5% or 8% of, you know, really energized activist minority to completely co-opt a conversation.
00:49:21.180And that's what has been accomplished.
00:49:23.000And, but it's not just that they're a minority.
00:49:25.480They're an exceptionally powerful minority, Sam.
00:49:48.740Where do you think this is going to go?
00:49:49.780Well, I think, if I had to bet, I think the vapors of wokeism will magically dissipate at a certain point.
00:50:02.340I think it's just whether we're going to have one example of hypocrisy or, you know, just one own goal that is so spectacular that everyone will just all of a sudden pretend that they were never woke.
00:50:18.280You know, like whether it's going to be just going to be a salient moment where you can point to in your timeline or it's just going to be this magical dissipation of, you know, where people start making much more sense on these topics.
00:50:30.540If I had to bet, I would think that's going to happen.
00:50:35.800And I think it's going to happen in some short order.
00:50:37.700I don't think we're going to be having this conversation in five years.
00:50:42.720I would be very surprised if we're having this conversation in five years now that, you know, count me, I guess, as an optimist on that front.
00:50:50.160And I certainly could be wrong, but I would be surprised.
00:50:52.720I mean, the one caveat I would put there is if we get four more years of Trump, then that goes completely out the window.
00:51:03.700I mean, I think if we get four more years of Trump or a Trump-like phenomenon that's just as provocative to the left, then that calculation changes.
00:51:12.720But if we've got a normal presidency in 2024, you know, Democrat or Republican, I think the woke thing has just become so unpragmatic.
00:51:29.980And, yeah, I just don't see how people don't begin aging out of it in some short order.
00:51:40.760I mean, it's somewhat analogous to the, it's a much bigger phenomenon, but it is analogous to the child sexual abuse, satanic panic thing we had.
00:51:51.040And I don't know if you guys had it in England.
00:51:55.040Yeah, which is the true, yeah, which is the true version of many of these concerns, yeah.
00:52:02.580But, yeah, I mean, in the States, I don't know if you know the story that the journalist Lawrence Wright told on my podcast, but he wrote a book on this.
00:52:13.300And when he was doing the New Yorker article that became a book, he was just researching the whole satanic panic phenomenon.
00:52:21.900And so the, for those who are too young to remember this, I mean, the allegation was that, you know, satanic cults had infiltrated preschools.
00:52:31.360And they just, in a very, you know, conspiratorial way, had decided to just get access to kids so that they could perform human sacrifices and ritual abuse.
00:52:43.680And this was now happening at scale in American society.
00:52:47.540And, you know, we had this massive problem.
00:52:49.620And it was, you know, who knows what was truly at the bottom of it.
00:52:54.740And, you know, whether it's, you know, certain, you know, rock lyrics were getting into the heads of teenagers and spawning a generation of devil worshipers.
00:53:04.560But we clearly have a problem on our hands.
00:53:06.380And so Lawrence Wright, in kind of getting onboarded to this phenomenon, went to a seminar run by law enforcement.
00:53:18.240I think, I'm not sure if it was, it might have been in Texas, where he's lived for many years.
00:53:24.020So it's just, this is, you know, a seminar for, you know, journalists run by law enforcement.
00:53:28.380And he remembers that moment where the, you know, the sheriff or some Leo said to the group, last year, 50,000 children were murdered in ritual sacrifices by satanic cults in this country.
00:53:53.100And it took Lawrence, you know, five seconds to understand that there's been no year in American history where there have been 50,000 murders of any kind.
00:54:57.580Is it possible that this new religion, and I certainly see wokeness as a religion, is a product of a society that has let go of that religion that it used to follow?
00:55:05.540Well, I think it's β I mean, the short answer is probably not, because I think many of the woke are, you know, religious by my lights.
00:55:18.620I mean, they would certainly claim to be religious.
00:55:20.120It's not like you have a β I don't know if polling research exists on this.
00:55:24.300It would be interesting to run these polls, but yes, yes, loss of faith has been kind of ramping up in America, you know, really in all secular democracies.
00:55:40.500But it's still not β you know, you don't have a minority of people β you don't have a majority of people identified as atheists, right?
00:55:46.640And the minority that identify with atheists is still in the single digits because atheism as a concept is just β it's got bad, you know, PR associated with it.
00:55:56.640You have something like 20 to 25 percent of the so-called nuns who are β again, these are not people who identify as atheists, but these are people who would say they're not identified with any specific church.
00:56:08.060But you still have most people who are, you know, at least nominally Christian and pretend to care about being Christian, you know, in the U.S. at this moment.
00:56:17.340And you have something like fully half who are, you know, really will check many or most β all of the boxes to attest to their belief.
00:56:29.160I mean, it's more than β you know, it's β if you ask β if you β and again, a lot of these people are on the Christian right,
00:56:36.520but many of them are woke or woke adjacent, you know.
00:56:41.500It's like I just was on Van Jones' podcast, right?
00:56:44.900Now, he's not β I mean, he's much woker than any of us.
00:56:52.400I think he's probably said some rational, pragmatic things.
00:56:57.420We didn't actually talk about this topic.
00:56:58.680He has. I remember seeing some of that.
00:56:59.680He's kind of taken the Obama line of like saying, listen, kids, like this is not β you know, they're bigger problems than pronouns or whatever.
00:57:09.720But still, he's like β he's someone whose coverage of Black Lives Matter I would have, you know, many critical things to say about.
00:57:21.060And again, the topic didn't come up, but he's β you know, he's someone who if you ask him, do you think Jesus will be returning to earth to raise the living and the dead, I am pretty sure he would say yes, right?
00:57:38.100And you'd be surprised at the number of β the percentage of sober, non-Bible-thumping people would say yes to that question.
00:57:48.300I mean, I was β I've been amazed at the β like the people who I would have β bet a lot of money would be skeptical of that piece.
00:58:14.860But that's kind of as far as it goes, right?
00:58:17.180Like I'm not going to make magical claims about flying saviors who are literally going to come down from where is heaven exactly given that we have, you know, multiple telescopes up there, you know, beaming back, you know, tens of billions of years worth of information.
00:58:37.380I'm amazed at the number of people who will bite the bullet on the core doctrine and say, yeah, I think Jesus is going to come back and raise the dead, right?
00:58:50.400But, Sam, surely you have to agree in a society which is becoming ever more atomized β
00:58:56.740Many of these people are awoke, right?
00:58:58.720So you can't say β the punchline can't be, well, they lost their religion and now they have a vacuum of ethical and existential vacuum that they're filling with wokeness.
00:59:10.940Now, there's β I would grant you that it's β don't lose your point.
00:59:15.040I would grant you that it's drawing a lot of quasi-spiritual, quasi-religious energy from the fact that most people in our society, even if they're nominally religious, really are struggling to find meaning in their day-to-day.
00:59:38.280But when you look at just the kind of the hour-by-hour increments at which, you know, life is doled out to us, like you get up and, you know, you're just β you're cast out of, you know, deep sleep or, you know, the phantasmagoria of dreams.
00:59:53.920Sometimes, you know, when the alarm goes off in the morning and how do you feel about your life and what is going to give you moral urgency and meaning.
01:00:05.120And a lot of β millions and millions of people found it at specific moments in our, you know, recent history.
01:00:14.940Like, and, you know, the George Floyd killing was certainly one of those moments where it's like, okay, this is β enough is enough.
01:00:25.460Like, and that's β it's understandable and it is β yes, it does have a religious dynamic and there's a religious dynamic.
01:00:36.420I mean, to call it religious is to just basically say β it's actually an invidious statement about religion.
01:00:45.060It's basically like all the things I don't like about religion is tribalism, it's dogmatism, it's immunity to good arguments and good evidence, right?
01:00:53.740The fact that it just β it can't be reasoned with, really, because it's just chucked reason out the door, you know, initially.
01:00:59.960And what it's brought back in the name of reason is functioning under the β the β the sort of the new physics of just casuistry.
01:01:08.520Like, like, we already know that God exists and we know that the Bible is perfect and we know the Quran is perfect.
01:01:13.220And so within that frame, now we're going to get really reasonable, like, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine.
01:01:20.900And that's all the stuff about religion that I find so obviously wrong and it's so easy to see once you're not indoctrinated into that religion.
01:01:33.960A lot of that is β explains what is happening politically on the far left and the far right at the moment.
01:01:42.100Or, you know, the far right being Trumpistan.
01:01:44.540So, Sam, but you β I think all of us have got to admit that in a society where we're becoming ever more atomized, where people are becoming more isolated, religion, organized religion, it was a bond.
01:02:04.320And so when people are disconnected, they're going to look for ways to connect with someone else.
01:02:09.920And what better way to do that was then with, you know, I support this political movement, BLM.
01:02:14.680Or, you know, you share the same immutable characteristics as me.
01:02:18.940You know, I'm gay or I'm black or et cetera, et cetera.
01:02:22.200Because we're so desperate, because we're literally programmed to form communities, that we're going to have this ideology which is going to enable us to create a community.
01:02:31.920Yeah, and on the woke side, it has this β I mean, it has a precursor in Christianity, but it's somehow in a purer form now.
01:02:44.860It has inverted the value structure such that, you know, the lower status you are, the higher status you come out, you know, once the calculation has been done.
01:02:57.220It's like, you know, Dungeons and Dragons with sort of the new dice, where it's like the least power points you have, you know, the more you find yourself winning.
01:03:07.060And so the victimology of it is, you know, and the meek shall inherit the earth.
01:03:13.660I mean, it's really β it is that ethos implemented in a very weird way and sort of gamified somehow in all of the intersectionality details of it.
01:03:24.720So, yeah, I mean, it's β there's no question people draw a tremendous amount of energy and, you know, I hesitate to say meaning.
01:03:37.300I mean, there's a meaning in scare quotes from this.
01:03:41.540And it's all β I mean, I guess β so, I mean, to steel man all of it, you know, briefly, it is β again, it's β especially on the left, it's genuinely confusing, right?
01:03:53.380Like the mad work that tiny pieces of misinformation or just fraudulent assumptions is doing is β it's really impossible to exaggerate.
01:04:08.340I mean, so if you ask most people who β like most people who saw the George Floyd moment, I mean, it's β again, I don't β we've yet to totally understand what happened there because, like, who knows?
01:04:24.900Just let's bracket that because I don't β we still don't know who Derek Chauvin really is and why he did what he did, right?
01:04:30.220So, like, either it was a racist murder or it was a β you know, his brain malfunctioned or, like, I just β I don't β honestly, I look at that video.
01:04:38.040I don't know what I'm looking at there.
01:04:39.460It's just a β it's apart from the horrible killing of a person who certainly did not need to be killed in that situation.
01:04:47.200But you ask most β most people who saw that, the vast majority of people who saw that, you know, certainly left of center, would bet their lives, bet the lives of their children that what they saw there was a racist lynching, right?
01:05:08.180Like, that was a β what we have is a white man killing a black man because of racism, because, like, that wouldn't have happened to a white man.
01:05:17.180It wouldn't have been perpetrated by a black man.
01:05:19.580Race is 100 percent of the explanatory variable there.
01:05:23.060And not only was that as unambiguously evil and sadistic and racist as it seemed, that happens thousands of times a year in America.
01:05:40.900Like, you ask people to estimate β how many black people do you think get murdered by white racist cops in America every year?
01:05:50.200So if you believe that, right, then what would you do?
01:05:55.620You know, what would you β wouldn't you two take to the streets when everyone says we're going to β you know, we're protesting on Tuesday?
01:06:05.600So it's like β so you don't have to add too many pieces of, you know, distorting, you know, pseudo facts to get people who I otherwise totally understand to mouth, you know, all the predictable pieties on this topic.
01:06:25.740But the truth is all of that is wrong, right?
01:06:29.480Like, you know, you can count on two hands the number of unarmed black men who get killed every year by cops.
01:06:38.400And you can count more white people who get killed every year by cops, right, under identical circumstances.
01:06:43.920Again, I've talked about this on my podcast, so we need not go there.
01:06:48.140Those who are interested could look at the episode, Can We Pull Back from the Brink?
01:07:01.880Yeah, so we can leave that aside, but the misinformation or the faulty assumptions occur at the highest level, right?
01:07:11.540It's like this is not β I mean does β I guess there are some people who actually know what is real here and are just cynically manipulating the politics.
01:07:20.520But I mean it's hard for me to believe that someone like Kamala Harris doesn't actually know the numbers, right?
01:07:26.740But it's not in her political interests or in what she conceives of as her political interests to act like she knows the numbers, right?
01:07:36.080But anyway, so it's not β I mean the charitable view is there are very few people who are consciously lying or seeking to do things that they know are wrong.
01:07:59.960I mean just conscious evil is a rare thing.
01:08:14.560So we'll pick out from our β we do a couple of questions for our supporters, so I'll make sure to pick out a COVID question because that came up a lot.
01:08:27.120I wanted β well, Francis and I both wanted actually to ask you.
01:08:30.060We've talked about these very divisive things and people will have a different opinion about Trump and COVID and Brexit and all of this stuff, whatever you want to β but one thing that strikes me is you're one of the few people that we've met who is content, who's happy.
01:08:47.940How does β how β if people are watching this and they would like to be happy in spite of all the terrible things that they think about, they see happening on Twitter.
01:08:56.440It strikes me β Francis uses your app every morning.
01:09:01.780How do you β how does one in the modern world get closer to that point where whatever is happening out, whatever storms are out there, you are calm and peaceful inside?
01:09:16.640Well, first, let me say I'm not β I'm certainly not always calm and peaceful, but the half-life β
01:09:26.500But the truth is β so the back story here is that, you know, in my early 20s, I got really into meditation.
01:09:34.120And I mean, so first, psychedelics just showed me that it was possible to have a very different experience of the world.
01:09:41.440And that there was a landscape of mind that could be explored based on just how you paid attention to experience, right?
01:09:48.300So prior to psychedelics, I would have really just been kind of waiting for the third-person brain-based discussion to deliver, you know, all the right answers about, you know, what the human mind is.
01:09:59.980And it was pretty well-established and still is, you know, thought to be well-established in Western science, you know, psychological science, cognitive science, and even Western philosophy that introspection was a dead end.
01:10:14.440I mean, they tried to get it off the ground somewhere around 120 years ago, and it just β you know, you come up short almost immediately.
01:10:22.980I mean, the truth is you close your eyes and you look inside, and you can't even tell that you have a brain, right, much less that the brain is doing all of these complex things that is actually delivering your experience of the world.
01:10:33.440So β and, I mean, this is just one curious asymmetry of cultural wisdom.
01:10:42.800In the East, you know, for all the failings of what didn't happen civilizationally in Eastern culture β and there's a lot to be said about that β they didn't lose this strand of wisdom,
01:10:58.360which is there actually is something to be discovered in a first-person way about the nature of your own mind that is liberating, right?
01:11:06.200Like, you suffer by a certain machinery, a certain dynamics, which could be either completely inscrutable to you or can become more and more transparent.
01:11:20.180And in its transparency, less and less operative on a moment-by-moment basis.
01:11:27.240And so, I mean, take any of the topics we've talked about.
01:11:30.240So we've talked about me getting on Twitter and getting really spun up over, you know, somebody saying something about me or about something else that I care about.
01:11:38.580But, you know, I've talked about, you know, anyone who thinks I have Trump derangement syndrome is going to look at me and say,
01:11:46.020well, why are you talking to this guy about meditation?
01:11:48.420This guy is so worked up over Trump, you know, what β it's like this is a β you know, it's a performative contradiction, right?
01:11:55.040That's actually to misunderstand my, you know, emotional relationship to the phenomenon of Trump, right?
01:12:02.680Like, I can say everything I say and think about Trump without spending much time feeling contracted around Trump.
01:12:14.880I mean, but it's not to say β that's not to say no time, but it's just much less time than I otherwise would if I didn't know how to, you know, quote, meditate, right?
01:12:24.340Now, the word meditation can mean many different things to people, but what I think it should mean is a β just a simple recognition of what consciousness is like prior to entanglement with thought, right?
01:12:43.780So we're all β three of us are sitting here and we're having an experience of the world that's happening in, you know, five sensory channels, but there's this other mode or this other, you know, aspect to our condition, which is our thinking about what we directly experience through our senses, right?
01:13:05.800And for most people, most of the time, the thoughts are incessant and uninspected, right?
01:13:13.640And their arising is unnoticed, right?
01:13:16.020So you're just β it just feels like you, right?
01:13:18.680It's like so you'll say something that I disagree with and there's a voice in me which says, what's he talking about?
01:13:27.880Or like, what β but you just β like, there's just that voice that, you know, is β that either feels like a self, I mean, in, you know, nearly 100% of the cases, that just feels like I, right?
01:13:45.200And then you're told something about the project of β well, again, so you could have an experience haphazardly or on psychedelics where that gets β that identification gets interrupted, right?
01:13:58.740Where all of a sudden, there's just β the mind is suddenly much more vast than that, right?
01:14:05.720It doesn't feel like there's a subject in the head looking out through your eyes at a world that's not you and, you know, forever implicated by the glances of other people and the opinions of other people.
01:14:18.260And it's just me in here, this sort of embattled ego trying to navigate a world that is fundamentally or at least potentially hostile to my interests, right?
01:14:28.680Like, that subject-object dichotomy where it's just β like, I'm the man in the boat trying to steer it, you know, to some safe place and not go over the falls emotionally, that suddenly relaxes.
01:14:44.200Again, it matters β now, I guess maybe I'm talking about psychedelics because it's more replicatable for people.
01:14:52.200Depending on what drug you've taken, that can relax in one or another way.
01:14:56.200I mean, MDMA is really just the relaxing of the emotional tone of all that without the pyrotechnics of changing your perceptions.
01:15:06.560If it's LSD or psilocybin, you can have a much more fundamental transformation of how you perceive the world.
01:15:13.800But whatever is the case, it just so happens that our nervous systems are perturbable pharmacologically or just by happenstance, right?
01:15:22.340This could happen to you just because it happens to you, right?
01:15:27.940But there's vast testimony on this topic that you can experience your mind as a much vaster place than you tend to experience it as.
01:15:40.660And then when you come back from one of those experiences, you might become interested in what is it that trims it down so reliably to this experience of confinement where you feel like it's just me here feeling uptight again, right?
01:16:00.260You know, virtually 100% of that is just what it's like to be you identified with thought.
01:16:10.940And then if you're identified with thought habitually, you are at the mercy of whatever you happen to think about, right?
01:16:17.960It's just like there's a, I mean, I've, I mean, the analogy I've drawn somewhere is just, it's really, it's like the most boring person in the world comes through the front door of your house and takes you hostage, right?
01:16:34.080You're like, follows you from room to room, telling you the same stories over and over again.
01:16:39.300You can't shut him up and you can't get away from him and it's just, and that's your life, right?
01:16:46.760And you're, you're thinking about the past, about what you could have said or should have said, or almost said, you're thinking about the future.
01:16:51.900What's this, what's, you know, how's this going to go?
01:16:54.340And most of the futures you, you visualize never happened the way you've, you've obsessed about them in the first place.
01:17:00.000So like 99% of your self-talk is, I mean, at best it's neutral with respect to its emotional tone.
01:17:09.900I mean, that's really, I mean, some people have, I'm convinced some people have a fairly happy self-talk and that's a, you know, it's sort of hard to get through to them because they really don't think of themselves as ever suffering much psychologically, right?
01:17:24.080They, they, they're very confident. They love the people in their lives. They get a lot of love back. They're not really conflict. They don't have regrets and disappointments that they're trailing.
01:17:33.360They're not, you know, they're not worried about anything and they just want to get up and do it again tomorrow because they're having so much fun. There are people like that.
01:17:41.480Yeah, but it's, most people are not like that, right? Most people are sensitive to this criticism of the default, which is most of what you're saying to yourself isn't making you happy and worse, it's, it's predicated on a fundamental illusion of selfhood, of identification with this, this subset of your, your mental experience, which is this, again, that this discursive thought.
01:18:09.320And when you break that identification, there's just much more space there and the past and the, and the, and the, I mean, the, the, the, it is in thought, it's in identification with thought that the past and the future exert their weight on the present, right?
01:18:28.380So like, it's like, we're, it's because we're, we're processing everything we experience in the present through this scrim of discursive thought that we don't, we never actually make satisfying contact with the present or we rarely do.
01:18:42.880And, and, and those moments where we do, you know, those, those peak kind of peak experience moments, what has made it be a peak is breaking the spell of thought for long enough for just to let in some of, of the breeze of, you know, awareness that it's always, I mean, it's always there, but we just don't, you know, we're blocking it continually.
01:19:03.320We just haven't opened the door or the window.
01:19:07.640And it's, so meditation really is, again, there are many different techniques or many different ways to describe it and frame it.
01:19:18.060In the end, it's actually not even a practice you're doing.
01:19:22.280It's not, it's, in the end, it is something you're ceasing to do.
01:19:28.440You're ceasing to be distracted by thought.
01:19:30.760You're, you're starting to notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness and noticed as, as appearances, they don't have force.
01:19:42.180They don't have, they don't have, they certainly don't have emotional force.
01:19:44.280It's not like you suddenly become an idiot and you can't figure out what you want to eat for dinner or, you know, how to, how to find your car or, I mean, you can, you can think and you can plan.
01:19:52.800But the moment you, you, you begin to suffer, you become, you, your, your new default is to become interested in, it's like, it's like a, it's like a mindfulness alarm, you know, starts sounding.
01:20:08.900And then you relax your identification with it, just the, just the, the, the physiology of suffering.
01:20:18.680I mean, so to bring it back to what we were just talking about.
01:20:21.080So, yeah, there's a moment where I notice something that I find, you know, either like personally annoying or, or the appropriate target of moral outrage.
01:20:34.780I mean, I don't think we should get, I'm not envisioning psychological health as being synonymous with never being angry ever again or never being fearful ever again.
01:20:44.320I mean, you know, negative emotions are, you know, from, from a, an enlightened point of view in my book are still salience cues, right?
01:20:55.380Like if I walk outside this house on the way to my car and someone physically attacks me on the sidewalk, like I don't want to be just a puddle of goo, you know, just beaming love at the person.
01:21:06.380Like now it's not, it's not to say that there's not, that's not a possible state of consciousness.
01:21:12.380And it actually, there, there are definitely scenarios where that, that quote works, right?
01:21:19.180Like just being the guy who's, you know, beaming unconditional love as your only response to anything, right?
01:21:27.340It's possible to get out of some physical altercation because it's just so surprising, right?
01:21:32.100Someone comes to mug you and you're just, you know, you're, you're on MDMA and you just say, listen, man, I love you, right?
01:21:39.100Like that could either, like that could turn out well, but practically speaking, it strikes me as totally appropriate to feel these kind of punctate, classically negative emotions.
01:21:54.740The quick, the real question is how long do they last and what are they good for?
01:22:00.280Like what, like when, when is it, when do you, when do you want to cease being angry so that you can actually function intelligently?
01:22:07.560And in my book, it happens very, very soon after the arising of anger.
01:22:13.580I mean, like, you don't, you don't want to stay angry, right?
01:22:15.600Like, but the, but the initial jolt of anger in, in many cases is totally appropriate.
01:22:22.920And it is the orienting response that you actually need to respond intelligently to the, you know, whatever the, you know, emergency or quasi-emergency is.
01:22:33.280So, but once you know how to meditate, you do notice that the half-life of negative emotions is really, really brief.
01:22:41.640I mean, it's, it's actually impossible to stay angry or embarrassed or, you know, whatever it is.
01:22:48.420Pick your negative emotion for longer than, you know, some tens of seconds, unless you're then, you're, you're taken in by thought again about why you should be angry or why you should be embarrassed.
01:23:01.720And, um, yeah, your life becomes completely different when you can get off the ride.
01:23:08.500You know, I mean, the difference between, between being angry for 10 seconds and being angry for 10 minutes, even, you know, much less 10 hours or 10 days.
01:23:19.180I mean, just, you just think of how life deranging those periods are where you're just helplessly motivated by anger, right?
01:23:27.760I mean, 10 minutes is enough to completely fuck up your life, right?
01:23:31.880I mean, to say the thing to your spouse that you, you can't, to ring the bell you can't unring, you know?
01:23:38.020And I mean, just like, you just see how people's lives run off the rails because their minds are out of control.
01:23:45.720And literally everything we see out there that is producing massive human suffering and, you know, existential risk even, you know, like literally everything beyond naturally occurring disasters, right?
01:24:01.600Is a matter of people's minds being out of control, right?
01:24:05.720I mean, we just have, we just have, we're running terrible legacy code, you know, in a condition of increasingly destabilizing power amplified by technology.
01:24:21.780I mean, it's getting increasingly easy for one person to screw it up for the rest of us.
01:24:27.720I mean, so the topic of existential risk is its own thing, which I've, you know, I'm focusing on more and more.
01:24:32.980I think it's, you know, it's, and it's, you know, neglected to a scary degree.
01:24:38.180I mean, it's just, they're just not that, they're not enough people thinking about how we can shore up our civilization against existential risk and, you know, man-made and otherwise.
01:24:47.620But, I mean, so much of the daily evidence of conflict and needless human misery is just born of people being captured by their thoughts and not knowing that there's any alternative, right?
01:25:03.800They're just, they're just talking to themselves, right?
01:25:05.780And they're just claiming to know things that they don't know and being persuaded by those, those inner proclamations, right?
01:25:13.280I mean, just like, what does it feel like to have a very strong opinion that is going to dictate everything you do next?
01:25:22.920And how often is that just an automaticity that's totally uninspected that would be, could be completely deflated just with another, with just a moment's pause if you only knew how to, you know, or just take the other side in that.
01:25:44.320Forget about meditation for a moment, just the ability to be skeptical about one's own opinions.
01:25:51.100Like, that's, talk about an untrained skill.
01:25:53.840I mean, that's just something that almost nobody has, right?
01:25:56.960Nobody even has it as a possible norm that you could endorse, even in the abstract, right?
01:26:02.940Like, why would you want to be skeptical about your own opinions?
01:26:07.080That's why I'm like you, I'm always starting debates around the dinner table, because I'm always testing what I think against what other people think.
01:26:14.920And because I'm aware that it's just thought, and it needs refining.
01:26:19.120But anyway, we've got one, Sam, first of all, thank you so much for coming on the show.
01:26:23.440What a pleasure to see you and speak with you and get a little bit of your opinion and wisdom.
01:26:27.820Can I just say, if people are listening to this, I use your app.
01:26:31.240It's actually brilliant, and it has changed my life.
01:26:33.580The ability to just sit and meditate for 10 minutes every morning is one of the most, if not the best way, to deal with obtrusive and obsessional thoughts.
01:26:42.280Every time he comes into the studio and he's all over the place, they go, have you meditated?
01:27:25.100I mean, I do think that, again, at the generic level, I mean, the problem is always failures of cooperation for us at this point.
01:27:40.880I mean, like virtually anything that's going to just happen to us, you know, coughed up by the hand of nature, we can figure out how to solve at this point.
01:27:51.260I mean, including an asteroid hurtling towards us.
01:27:54.520I mean, at this point, we have enough tech, and I'm not so sure we have enough people watching, but close, that we'd have tens of years, right?
01:28:05.080And we'd have some decades to deal with a problem, that specific problem.
01:28:10.980But so all of our problems on some level are of our own making.
01:28:15.560I mean, if nothing else, it's just our β the opportunity costs born of all of the needless bullshit we get entangled with based on our own, you know, incapacity to cooperate.
01:28:27.440So it's just β it's β and that's the first order of business and the next one to figure out how we can have successful conversations on some level, right?
01:28:40.580Because, again, all we have is a capacity to persuade one another so as to engineer, you know, forward-looking cooperation, or we have violence, right?
01:28:53.040And, like, in the end, it's like we just have to force people to do stuff if we can't persuade them to do stuff or that they're β you know, they can't come to the epiphanies on their own.
01:29:04.900And β but more and more, I think we're in a situation where because of technology, it's strangely getting harder and harder to get our, you know, our cognitive horizons to fuse, right?
01:29:24.600We've got 8 billion strangers more or less trying to figure out how to cooperate and persuasion is the only good tool.
01:29:35.440Again, I mean, we're going to have to use force in certain circumstances and, you know, I think we should be very β I don't think pacifism is a plan there.
01:29:46.100I mean, I think we actually do need to have our force game together for the situations where we need it, you know, and that's individually and collectively, right, at the level of nation states as well.
01:29:58.920But, yeah, I'm increasingly worried about our incapacity to converge on just a dispassionate, fact-based discussion on things that are just so easy to assess.
01:30:14.480I mean, just like we've touched several topics here, but just like how many people of any identity get killed by cops every year in America?
01:30:23.000And just like what are β it's like how does that relate to the levels of crime, you know, perpetrated by people of various identities?
01:30:30.740And like what situations are cops actually getting into and what are their reasonable expectations of people in a society where there are 400 million guns?
01:30:38.720You know, like why is it different when an American suddenly turns around and reaches into the cab of his pickup truck while getting arrested than when that happens in Japan, right, like where there are no guns, right?
01:30:49.820But this is such an β this should be such an easy conversation to have, right?
01:30:55.400There should be no β like β I mean, this is β it's not even β I mean, it's hard to think of a simpler one where the facts are easier to get.
01:31:08.960I mean, most of the β and most of the stuff is on β so much of the stuff is on videotape.
01:31:59.460So we β I mean, we need β that is a β I mean, that's certainly a software flaw in our operating system.
01:32:07.500It's not a feature and β I mean, one way I've summarized this in the past for people is that β I mean, your capacity to be offended is not something that anyone need or should respect in you.
01:32:23.980Like that's just not β it's not an β it's certainly not an argument, but it's not even a basis for respect.
01:32:29.640Like that β like table stakes for any ethical conversation is more than just your capacity to be offended, right?
01:32:38.800And until you understand that, like you're just not β you can't play the game we need to play in order to ensure an open-ended circumstance of cooperation.